{"id":2511,"date":"2020-09-29T08:51:25","date_gmt":"2020-09-29T07:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessfinancenews.com\/?p=2511"},"modified":"2022-01-01T01:48:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-01T00:48:44","slug":"firstrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessfinancenews.com\/investments\/firstrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Firstrade"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Firstrade is a discount stockbroker (1<\/a>). It is regulated by federal agencies regarding security exchange (5<\/a>) as the SEC Security Exchange Commission (6<\/a>) (7<\/a>) and FINRA (8<\/a>). Firstrade is a brokerage service recommended for those investors who prefer not to pay commissions for trading (2<\/a>) and those operators who focus exclusively on the markets of the United States (3<\/a>). Furthermore, Firstrade is for us the best broker to operate with mutual funds (4<\/a>): more than 400 funds are available on the platform (3<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just to summarize the structure of fees in Firstrade, we can define that they have generally low fees for direct trading operations and low indirect trading fees as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This statement is because there are no fees or operations on United States stocks, on ETFs, or on mutual fund investing, but there are fees for operating with bonds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also fees for margin trading that we will discuss below as well. These are the ones we call financing rates. We do not expect it free of any interest rate, as this is a loan that the broker is furnishing to the investor but anyway they have high-interest rates for margin trading if you consider the main competitors Fidelity, Tastyworks<\/a>, or ETrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And for indirect trading fees you do not have deposit fees, you do not have inactivity fees unless the account is dormant for many years, and there is no fee for withdrawals provided that you do it through ACH. You will have to pay a withdrawal fee if you perform the withdrawal using a wire transfer or bank transfer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we analyzed the fees structure in Firstrade, we worked with the same criteria as with the other companies that are the Firstrade competitors in order to make the comparisons much easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We take direct fees and indirect fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The direct fees are the ones that you are obliged to pay when you perform a trade. Examples of these direct fees are overnight fees, conversion fees, and commissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The indirect fees are the ones that are charged to you by items that are not related to any operation you performed. Of course, we expect that these indirect fees are very low or directly they do not exist. Examples of these indirect fees are deposit fees, monthly maintenance fees, fees regarding inactivity for a certain period of time, or fees that you are obliged to pay when you withdraw funds from your Firstrade account to transfer them to your bank account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s see these direct and indirect fees for Firstrade in detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For trading On United States stock activities, Firstrade does not have any fees and in this case, we are in the same position as other competitors like Robinhood<\/a>, Tastyworks<\/a>, Fidelity, and Etrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are other rates that you have to pay in Firstrade, and this is the case of the margin rate. You will always be charged for an operation when you are trading on margin because in these margin operations it is like you are taking a loan from the brokerage service that allows you to complete the operation. For this money that you borrowed from the broker, you must pay an interest. And this is what we call the overnight charge or the financing rate. Financing rates are usually high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Firstrade the financing rate is 9.3%. It is lower than other competitors like Fidelity and ETrade. These financing rates however depend on the volume of your debit balance so there is a tiered rate depending on that volume. If you have a debit balance of more than $10,000 you would be enjoying a lower rate of nine percent for the financing rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Firstrade you can also perform investments in mutual funds. This is something interesting to mention because in other competitors like Webull or Tastyworks you cannot operate with mutual funds. In Firstrade you are not paying any commissions for mutual fund investing. These are excellent news because with the competition you would be paying a pretty high commission. For example, if you purchase mutual funds for $2000 you are not paying anything in Firstrade, but you would be paying 37.50 in Fidelity and $20 in ETrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstrade is for us the best broker to operate with mutual funds.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Firstrade you can also operate with bonds and we will return to the bonds and to the mutual funds later when we discuss the product portfolio availability that you can utilize in Firstrade. But in this paragraph, we are only dedicating to the structure of fees in Firstrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, regarding bonds, there is a huge scale of commissions. But as usual we will take only one kind of bond and see the commission there. So, we calculated the bonds for United States Treasury bonds. In Firstrade you must pay a minimum commission of $40 and this is for me very high because in Fidelity and ETrade even must pay anything for operating with bonds. only secondary CDs have to pay less: a $30 commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s see what happens when you do a trade of options. In this case, it is similar to when you operate with US stocks mutual funds and ETF\u2019s in Firstrade. It is completely free of the payment of any commission. And this is better than the closest competitors because in Fidelity you would pay $6 and you will be paying the same in ETrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that is all for the direct fees and we can see that the direct trading fees are not high: there are some fees but are not high and in some operations like mutual funds, US stocks, and ETFs it is totally commission-free. When we discuss the product portfolio, later on below, we want to pay a lot of attention to the funds because I am sure that Firstrade is the best brokerage service right now for funds. But we will discuss that later and now we will concentrate on the indirect fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regarding the indirect fees so the fees that are unrelated to any trading operation also Firstrade has low fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no account fee in the sense that you do not have to pay a maintenance fee like you have to pay in some brokers or the ones that you have to pay in consumer banking for some credit cards specially secured credit cards that you have to pay a maintenance fee. Well, this is not the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, we discovered that there is an inactivity fee if you keep your account without being used for many years. So, there is $100. Let’s call it \u201cpenalty\u201d for having a dormant account. But I could not find exactly for how many years you need to have this account dormant so that you have to pay this processing fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No indirect fees except this dormant account fee for physical persons this is for individuals like you and me. However in the case of companies, corporations, LLCs, (these are called legal entities) they have to pay $100 for the opening of the account and $200 annually and this is a maintenance fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So this means non-trading fees for the individuals except the dormant account fee and yes, there are indirect trading fees for legal entities for account opening and an annual maintenance fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are going to perform a withdrawal you must use an ACH transfer in order to have it for free. If you are not going to use an ACH for the withdrawal transfer and you are utilizing a local bank instead, the wire transfer will cost you $30. If this wire transfer is performed to a foreign financial institution it will cost $50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So as a summary of the fees we have as a conclusion, that there are generally no fees for operations with US stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. Regarding indirect fees these are very low: there are no indirect fees for deposits for individuals. There are only indirect trading fees for legal entities as there is a fee of $100 for the opening of the account of a legal entity and $200 as an annual maintenance fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The account opening process is fast and easy to complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstrade operates with customers from practically any country. International accounts are welcome. Before 2020, the eligibility was limited just to a few countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About the minimum deposit, it is good news to inform you that there is no minimum deposit. Does not matter if you are a US customer or if you are a client from one of the countries that are allowed to operate with Firstrade, there is absolutely no deposit defined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, if instead of a cash account you are working with a margin account, as you are operating with money you are borrowing from the brokerage service you are required to fulfill a minimum deposit of $2000. The reason here is because you are trading on leverage and you are taking a loan from the broker. That is why it is required to deposit $2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For accounts to perform day trading operations, as typical, you are required to deposit a minimum of $25,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstrade is very generous in the type of accounts that you can open with them. You probably remember when we reviewed companies like Webull<\/a>, that we were only allowed to work with individual accounts. Likewise, in the case of Tastyworks<\/a>, we have more options because we could open joint accounts, but we were limited in some other possibilities. In this case with Firstrade, we can work with a mosaic of accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For foreigners that opened an account with Firstrade, only individual and joint accounts are offered. Obviously, an individual account is the one owned by a physical person and registered with his name, which is not a legal entity. The joint account is when the account is owned by two or more physical persons or individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Therefore, for legal reasons the following account types that are offered by Firstrade correspond only to United States residents wherein the American laws are valid. These are custodial accounts and business accounts. The latter are the ones owned by legal entities like LLCs, corporations, trusts, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We include in this list of account types for US residents, the retirement accounts. These are the retirement accounts of the subsection 401K. As this 401K is a subsection of the Internal Revenue Code this type of retirement accounts applies only for United States residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are a foreign resident and anyway you want to operate with retirement accounts, there are other options like Degiro and some European brokers that work with European retirement accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we introduced earlier to our readers, opening the account in Firstrade is very easy and has to be done exclusively online. There is a form that is an online application that takes something like 10 to 20 minutes to be completed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After completing this form, that encompasses three consecutive screens, you press submit and there is a background process for verification. This process takes more time. Some readers said that it took them several days. For us, it took four working days until the verification process took place successfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the online application form you must enter all your personal information. You have to select which account type you want to open, for example, if you want a retirement account, a joint account, or a personal account. You are required to explain if you are going to operate with day trading or not and in this case if you put \u201cno\u201d you are not required to do a minimum deposit as we explained before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After this, you have to add more data like the Social Security Number (SSN) and your phone number. Put a real number because you will need this for the registration process and for verification of your account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You will be requested to inform in the online application about which is your level of knowledge of trading. Furthermore, you can introduce here your bank account to do the association between your bank account and your new Firstrade account. This is something that you will have to do anyway at some moment if you want to do trading operations. This is valid for cash accounts. In margin accounts, you are required to link your bank account and when your account is validated after a couple of days, deposit two thousand dollars as a security deposit without any deposit fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As happened with all the other services that we reviewed, you will be indicated to scan your identification or passport that you have and upload it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All these controls and verifications seem like a very complex and tedious scrutiny process but are required by financial and trading best practices and compliance regulations to satisfy the principle \u201cknow your customer\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s see the process of deposit money in the Firstrade account and the withdrawal process thereof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The deposit process is when you transfer from your bank account to your Firstrade account. The withdrawal process on the other hand is when you do the transfer from the Firstrade account to your bank. In Firstrade we found this process as fine. Nevertheless, there are many points that can be improved anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For deposits, notice that there are no fees for deposits. If you are a resident of the United States, you can use ACH, bank transfers, or checks. As it was typical in most of the brokers we reviewed, you cannot utilize credit cards, electronic wallets, or debit cards to perform the deposits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we compare this with the closest competitors like Fidelity and ETrade we will see that they are pretty much on the same page. However, in Fidelity, you can utilize electronic wallets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An ACH transfer takes three business days. Before you do this ACH deposit you have to link your account with the Firstrade brokerage account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, everything good about the deposit. Normally you will see in many companies that this process is free because they want you to deposit money in your broker account so you can start trading as soon as possible and as frictionless as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let’s go to the withdrawals of funds in Firstrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regarding withdrawals, there are no fees either. If you utilize an ACH withdrawal, transferring electronic funds in the United States there is no fee. If it is a domestic wire transfer, it will cost $30 whereas a bank transfer to an international financial institution will cost $50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you use ACH there are no fees so I will always recommend you utilize ACH to do a withdrawal and do not use the wire transfer because of the high fees. In this sense the closest competitors are also in the same boat because with Fidelity and Etrade, you do not have to pay any withdrawal fee with the condition that you do it through ACH. It takes 2 days after the withdrawal to see the money in your bank account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To perform the withdrawal in Firstrade you have to log in, go to your dashboard and you will see many tabs like \u201cHome\u201d \u201cMy Accounts\u201d \u201cTrading\u201d \u201cResearch and Tools\u201d, \u201dRetirement and Planning\u201d, \u201cEducation\u201d, and \u201cCustomer Service\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second tab is \u201cMy accounts\u201d. So, go to the option \u201cDeposit\/ transfer\u201d and select the option called \u201cWithdraw from Firstrade\u201d. Here you have to choose which is the external account with the financial institution that you have associated and select which kind of transfer type you want to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You have to also introduce the quantity and I recommend it to be ACH because it is free of commissions. Otherwise, you have to pay $30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our methodology here is to utilize the different environments available to the customers to operate with the brokerage service. In the case of Firstrade, we will study the web environment, the mobile application, and the desktop platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s start with the web trading platform. This is the platform that you can access with an URL and worked very well for me in the Chrome browser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is easy to use; I did not have any difficulties and the design is fine with tones of darker blue and lighter blue. Very few customization options, just cosmetic changes to the arrangement of tabs were necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The way to navigate is through different tabs that are the different features offered in the service. You have a tab for \u201cCustomer service\u201d for \u201cEducation\u201d for \u201cRetirement and Planning\u201d for \u201cTools\u201d for \u201cTrading operations\u201d and what is called the \u201cInvestor Home\u201d workspace. Here you have information about your account chat about the market with gainers and losers and which are the percentage of gainers and losers and some links to news and notices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The login is, as we see in most of the cases a one-step login, unluckily. We referred many times that this is not secure, and we prefer that the brokers establish more secure protocols and work with two-step authentication. One step authentication is fine in some websites that you log in but here I understand that we would require more security so we would like to have a two-step authentication. Furthermore, in Firstrade you can open an account with a legal entity and legal entities for compliance reasons dislike to login company data with one-step authentication. Especially when in their internal corporate environment, they have established policies and security protocols of two-step authentication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s see the search functions. I always talk about the search functionality because I am the type of user that likes to go into my dashboard, and enter in the search box the ticker or the name of the company that will be here the asset and start filtering from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the web environment, this search is good. For example, I started to write in the search box AM\u2026.. and AMAT appeared as a dynamic proposal for AMAT Applied Materials Incorporated. Very good search functionality in the web trading application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Firstrade web application, you have the ability to work with many order types and this is very good too. Let\u2019s see which ones are available: \u201cMarket\u201d, \u201cLimit\u201d, \u201cStop\u201d, \u201cStop limit\u201d, \u201cstop trailing\u201d and \u201cstop-limit trailing\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is possible that you are familiar with some of these order types and not with others. I suggest you go to my article where I explain the order types. Not all the order types will be available in all the brokerage services, but it is good that you know them because you can get a lot of advantages if you know them well. I understand that knowing the order types make you excel in order management, so this is something you have to know well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On these orders, you can also establish limits like an AON (all or nothing) an \u201cGood till 90 days\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is very easy to do this in the environment. To perform an order there, you have to go to the tab called \u201cTrading\u201d. Inside there you select which operation you are going to do because you can select options like mutual funds, or stocks\/ ETFs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I did is I selected \u201corder entry\u201d. There I select the transaction that can be \u201cbuy\u201d \u201csell\u201d \u201csell short\u201d or \u201cbuy to cover\u201d. I select the asset introducing the symbol for example AAPL for Apple and you have to select the order type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When done you can press the button \u201cSend Order\u201d. Quite simple and no difficulties here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also set up alerts, and the system will send you an alert to the email you have declared when you created the account with the brokerage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To create this alert is easy. You probably think like me that you have to go to the \u201cMy Accounts\u201d tab but it is not there. It is in the \u201cResearch and Tools tab\u201d. And this is fine because I think the alert functionality as a tool for the trader. Therefore, it is fine if the alert via emails has to be set up in the Tools menu of your dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s see the mobile trading platform that is the app that you will download for free in your Android system or Apple iOS. As usual, I have tested it with the Apple iOS because it is easier for me as this is the cell phone that I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\tPros And Cons Of Firstrade<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Pros<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Cons<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Structure of fees In Firstrade<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Fees only for Operations With Bonds<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Direct Fees And Indirect Fees<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Direct Trading Fees<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Indirect Trading Fees<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Account opening process<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Type of accounts that are offered by Firstrade.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Process of opening the account<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Deposit And Withdrawal Of Funds Process<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Deposits To The Firstrade Account<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Withdrawals In Firstrade<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
User Experience <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Web Trading Platform<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Mobile Trading Platform<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n